The powers that the EU ought to have are those that the member states cannot exercise effectively on their own: no more and no less.

Nosemonkey:

the EU’s “democratic deficit”[...] is actually preserving the sovereignty of the member states.

Jean Quatremer:

(Solana) L’homme qui “parle toutes les langues sans qu’on puisse en comprendre aucune”.

Joschka Fischer:

Karlsruhe ballert in seiner Entscheidung mit verfassungsrechtlichen Kanonen auf imaginierte Spatzen: “ Wenn man das Urteil bis zum Ende lese, gewinne man den Eindruck, „man befände sich in einer Fraktionssitzung der britischen Konservativen“.

Norman Cohn (from the 1995 foreword to Warrant for Genocide (1967) – via Martin Amis:

There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political powerand changes the course of history.

Wolfgang Münchau:

A Europe presided over by Messrs Barroso and Blair is a modern European hell. Only it is no joke.

Tony Barber:

But it is almost an iron EU law that the people first mentioned in connection with big jobs are seldom the ones that get them.